[PDF] Shakespeare And The English Renaissance Sonnet eBook
Shakespeare And The English Renaissance Sonnet Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Shakespeare And The English Renaissance Sonnet book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
This book is an analysis of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. It especially traces the relations between Shakespeare's sonnets and the ways in which other writers use the form. It looks at how the poetry fits into the historical situation at the time, with regard to images of the family and of women. Its exploration of these issues is informed by much recent work in critical theory, which it tries to make as accessible as possible.
Of Shakespeare's sonnets we know the crystalline meter, exquisite diction, and exhilarating surprise of the "turn" in the final couplet. By contrast, we know very little of their subjects and motives. This book does not approach the sonnets as Shakespearean autobiography but instead delineates the customs that shaped the poet's world and thus his sonnets. It argues for understanding them as brilliant, edgy expressions of the equally brilliant, edgy culture of the English Renaissance.
This introduction provides a concise overview of the central issues and critical responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets, looking at the themes, images, and structure of his work, as well as the social and historical circumstances surrounding their creation. Explores the biographical mystery of the identities of the characters addressed. Examines the intangible aspects of each sonnet, such as eroticism and imagination. A helpful appendix offers a summary of each poem with descriptions of key literary figures.
Author : Jonathan F. S. Post Publisher : Oxford University Press Page : 161 pages File Size : 12,91 MB Release : 2017-09-21 Category : Literary Criticism ISBN : 019102709X
Not for nothing is William Shakespeare considered possibly the most famous writer in history; his works have had a lasting effect on culture, vocabularies, and art. His plays contain some of our most well-known lines (how often have you heard the phrase 'To be or not to be'?), yet whilst his poems may often feel less familiar than his plays they have also seeped into our cultural history (who has not heard of ''Shall I compare thee to a summer's day'?). In this Very Short Introduction Jonathan Post introduces all of Shakespeare's poetry: the Sonnets; the two great narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; A Lover's Complaint; and The Phoenix and Turtle. Describing Shakespeare's double identity as both poet and playwright, in conjunction with several of his contemporaries, Post evaluates the reciprocal advantages as well as the different strategies and strains that came with writing for the stage and the page. Tackling the debates surrounding the disputed authorship of Shakespeare's poems, he also considers the printing history of Shakespeare's canon, and the genres favoured by the bard. Exploring their reception, both with contemporary audiences and through the ages until today, Post explores the core themes of love and lust, and analyzes how the sonnets compare with other great love poetry of the English Renaissance. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class.
This Companion represents the myriad ways of thinking about the remarkable achievement of Shakespeare’s sonnets. An authoritative reference guide and extended introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Contains more than 20 newly-commissioned essays by both established and younger scholars. Considers the form, sequence, content, literary context, editing and printing of the sonnets. Shows how the sonnets provide a mirror in which cultures can read their own critical biases. Informed by the latest theoretical, cultural and archival work.
Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.
For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, course: Petrarchism in English Renaissance Poetry, language: English, abstract: Ever since the first publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Thomas Thorpe’s, very likely unauthorized, Quarto-edition in 1609, these poetic masterpieces have interested and captivated readers and critics alike for the following centuries. Shakespeare’s exceptional abilities as a playwright as well as a poet have always drawn the attention of literary criticism towards his works and also to his sonnets. In the past, critics have often tried to answer all sorts of questions concerning the sonnets. Among the questions dealt with, like the identity of the persons mentioned in the poems, the correct order and structure of the sonnet cycle and many others, critics also tried to answer in which ways Shakespeare used and incorporated already existing poetic conventions and in how far he wrote against, contrasted and overcame common literary traditions by producing, according to Pequigney’s praise, “the greatest of all love-sonnet sequences”. The common literary tradition for writing love poetry that not only English but also continental poets followed in the sixteenth century was that of Petrarchism. Already after Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, had introduced this way of writing love poetry, the fashion of imitating or adopting and sometimes contrasting the Petrarchan way of writing poetry spread from Italy to France, Spain, the Netherlands and also to England4, where Wyatt and Surrey introduced the sonnet form and the thematic aspects which characterize Petrarchism5. Although Petrarchism, with its many followers who, despite striking similarities, often exhibit different ways of adopting the model set by Petrarch, seems not too easy to define6, this paper aims to show how this prominent love poetry tradition was adopted and adapted by Shakespeare for his Sonnets. To achieve this goal it seems essential to try to define what the Petrarchan way of writing love poetry is and why it became a predominant fashion in England before and during the time Shakespeare wrote his sonnets. This is to be the purpose of the following chapter.